Review

Radio Waves: Telling stories

Listening to a story read aloud, celebrated today by Radio 4’s Something
Understood, is one of the great — though increasingly rare — pleasures of
human life. This newspaper, like all newspapers, magazines and books, will
be read silently; and yet, as Stephen Fry pointed out in Fry’s English
Delight last Monday, “for a third of our 21 centuries, all reading was
aloud”. An Argentinian writer told him that reading aloud “brings to the
surface the music of the text”, and that difficulties on the page, as,
famously, with James Joyce’s Ulysses, can simply evaporate when they are
read aloud.

Sarah Cuddon, in today’s programme, points out that the imprisoned Nelson
Mandela recited Victorian poetry he had learnt by heart, such as William
Ernest Henley’s Invictus — “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of
my soul” — to other prisoners, and endorses the notion that poetry read
aloud communicates with